Shopping with Freud

Rachel Bowlby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134928729
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

What is a consumer? Shopping with Freud looks at some of the surprising ways in which the consumer subject appears in a range of writings - from literature to marketing psychology to psychoanalysis.
Rachel Bowlby shows how ideas about consumption are brought to bear on contemporary conceptions of choice in areas that seem far removed from a straightforward matter of shopping. She also shows that arguments and assumptions about the psychology of consumers themselves throw light on genderal questions of human psychology.

Chapter 1
Introduction

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), the choiceless population engineered by the wonders or horrors of an almost flawless technology of test-tube reproduction is conditioned into an automatic reverence for a being who has two names: ‘Our Ford—or Our Freud, as for some inscrutable reason he chose to call himself whenever he spoke of psychological matters.’¹ By the 1930s, it is feasible to imagine a partnership to the point of identification between on the one hand a psychology typified by psychoanalysis and on the other the mass production and consumption suggested by the car; and the association is appropriately encapsulated by one of the verbal techniques of modern publicity, the sloganizing style of a near-homonym. The Ford-Freud doubling suggests that consumption and psychology together made or will make the late-modern world: that for all practical purposes (and there are no others) they are one.

In Huxley’s dystopia, actual automobiles have long since been superseded by private flying machines, and the fathers, mothers and other familial encumbrances of interest to Freud and his contemporaries have been replaced by more efficient modes of infantile training. But the now primitive Fordian-Freudian period is viewed as the beginning of a process completed by the standardized production of people as well as cars. The mass production and mass consumption epitomized in its 1930s version by the Ford is matched by a mass applied psychology aimed at the production of happy worker-consumers.

Huxley’s humans, carefully stratified from alpha to epsilon, are made (not born) to consume what they are also made to produce; the nearest they come to free association is the random regurgitation of the buy-more injunctions they take in with their juvenile sleep: ‘“I do love flying,” they whispered, “I do love having new clothes, I do love…”’ (49). A faint possibility of difference or resistance, already indicated by the weary irony of the title, is personified principally in the form of a ‘savage’ who has been fortunate enough to fall on the complete works of Shakespeare, a treasure-trove of formulae that the novel unhesitatingly endorses as being of a higher quality than those available to the rest of the world in the form of advertising clichés.

Women have no part in these gestures towards the possibility of resistance: even the unfortunate Linda, rediscovered after years of abandonment in the ‘Reservation’ outside ‘civilization’, and mother of the smart Shakespearean savage, remains faithful to the last to her early indoctrinations, providing the novel instead with the occasion for an excursion into misogynist grotesque, as her body reveals signs of age and obesity unknown to the newer world. Yet this does not imply any approval of more modern modes of feminization. The technologization of reproduction—no natural births, and a process of rearing that is scientifically controlled—is dramatically staged as the novel’s opening spectacle, exemplifying the most fundamental aspect of the deprivation of a freedom characterized as freedom of choice.

In this fantasy of a totally engineered human condition, consumption and psychology are indissoluble partners, united in a conspiracy which can be challenged only by the dismissal of both as agencies which are as pernicious and uniform as are their assumed effects. Humans are duped and drugged into a spurious consumerly conformity and happiness which is most effective in relation to women, and against which only literature might provide the tiny chance of another way of thinking. In these contexts, Huxley’s novel brings together with clarity and simplicity most of the common connections and questions which form the background to this book.

The Foreword Huxley wrote for Brave New World in 1946, having outlined three possible future scenarios for world developments, concludes with the telling words: ‘You pays your money and you takes your choice’ (14). The pseudo-demotic irony of this does not alter the fact that consumer choice has become the paradigm for ethical and political choice. In this regard, Huxley perhaps saw truer than in any of his wilder (or more civilized) new-world imaginings. For in Britain more recently, the word ‘consumer’ has entered everyday public language under many new guises. Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s vision of a society, or collection of individuals, granted ‘more and more choice’ has been accompanied by an increasing tendency for people to be addressed as ‘consumers’ whatever their activity. Not just when we are shopping, but when we are voters, students, patients, parents, citizens of all sorts, we are now to identify ourselves as consumers, and that term is supposed to give us rights from which we were previously debarred.

This positive consumer is the direct antithesis of an earlier manifestation of the word. The consumer invoked in relation to ‘postwar consumer society’ was not the summit of rational individuality, but a poor dupe, deluded by the onslaught of an irresistible and insidious advertising industry. S/he was to be rescued from her distraction, restored if possible to the capacity for reasonable behaviour of which the forces of consumerism were busy depriving her or him. This second, passive and deluded consumer has not disappeared from the contemporary picture: there are still many denunciations of the latest forms of consumer manipulations taking place alongside the endorsements of modern consumer citizenship. Equally, the new figure of consumer rationality can be seen to have a prehistory when we look back to the earlier period: in the 1960s, there were organizations acting on behalf of ‘consumer rights’ which opposed to the model of the captivated consumer that of the consumer as someone making sensible choices.

As the final chapter discusses in more detail, diametrically opposed views of choice are implied by the two views of the consumer outlined above. In one, s/he has no choice: the choice is imposed, even if it feels like spontaneous desire. In the other, s/he has full powers of choice and is restricted only by lack of information. But at the same time, these two versions rotate around the same two poles of control or abandon, full information or utter impressionability. There is more to say about the possibilities and limits of having or making a choice; and this is what brings consumption straight into the territory of psychology.

The question that advertisers have been asking throughout this century—‘what persuades someone to choose to buy?’—involves issues about the nature of human psychology parallel to those which preoccupy critics of consumerism, as well as psychologists of all kinds. When Vance Packard, in 1957, denounced the insidious effects of ‘manipulation’ in advertising, he used the manipulators’ own psychology, accepting that people can be persuaded against their conscious will; the only difference between Packard and his enemies is in the moral terms (he thinks they are wrong to use that power). More gently, when Betty Friedan a few years later deplored the effects of women’s magazines and other institutions in promoting a feeble, domesticated kind of femininity, she did so by setting up and promoting her own image of what a woman really is in its place. Both their books—The Hidden Persuaders and The Feminine Mystique—were bestsellers, functioning as successful advertisements themselves: Friedan’s is generally thought of as the book which launched the ‘second wave’ of feminism in the United States and Europe. The critic has to become a persuader, hidden or not, in order to make the case against the persuaders.

What this further suggests is that a straightforward denunciation of consumerism is missing the point: one form of persuasion is simply doubled by another that claims superior force. It suggests too that far from advertising getting it wrong (in a moral sense or a factual sense), this vast twentieth-century organization may have pointed the way to arguments about human psychology in fields we think of as far removed from those of commercial machinations and manipulations.

This book then explores some of the ways that issues of consumer choice, and of choice in general, are implicitly or overtly explored in literature and in writing about psychology and marketing. The chapter on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) reads this novel in terms of a relation between aestheticism and the consumerism beginning to develop at the time. The aesthetically perfect youth is the prototype of the ideal narcissistic consumer created and targeted by one form of advertising: you who can look like this, have and do anything you want, with no restraints and no consequences. The 1960 British trial of D.H.Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which is the subject of the next chapter, involves revealing permutations of the terms pornography, literature, consumption and sexuality which are directly related to what goes on in the novel itself. Consumption and pornography have to be dismissed as the vulgar dirt that then enables the uneasy claiming of great literature and healthy relationships in their absolute difference. Nabokov’s Lolita, another novel that was controversial at the turn of the 1960s, takes these terms in a different direction. As with Dorian Gray, this is the story of a connection between eroticism, youthful aesthetic perfection and the pleasures of limitless consuming. And as with Lady Chatterley, the question of pornography hovers around something which is also a question of consumerism—in Lolita very directly, with Lolita’s consuming American vulgarity represented (at least ostensibly) as the antithesis of the narrator’s European intellectual superiority.

‘A happy event’, which looks at Freud’s writings on the breakup between himself and Josef Breuer over the ‘Anna O’ case, puts questions about the nature of the wish or the choice to have a child which are then connected to the current debates around the new reproductive technologies and the kinds of choice they imply. The choice to have a child tends to be seen according to one of three categories. Either it is imposed (by society), or it is spontaneous (a matter of biological urges), or else it is simply placed on a par with other sensible (not impulsive) human choices. The different light that might be cast by a psychoanalytic way of thinking about this brings the book round full circle, returning from the other direction to the question of how different notions of choice deployed in discussions of consumption, feminism and psychoanalysis need to be looked at all together, in their overlaps and in the ways that they illuminate and challenge one another.

The final chapter, ‘Make up your mind’, explores some of the ramifications of the shopping-and-psychology connections appearing on both sides of the Atlantic at the time of Huxley’s writing, when Freud’s works—among many others—were already being taken up by marketing theorists as clues to the understanding of the minds of potential buyers. Putting their writings into relation with the psychoanalytic theory which was developing at the same time leads to some concluding questions about the habitual forgetting or simplification of notions of consumerism within other discourses. The marketing concern to discover what might persuade people to make purchases was intimately bound up, both institutionally and intellectually, with the contemporary psychoanalytical focus on the conscious and unconscious determinants of choices in life and love. There is a consumer subject in Freud who has not been noticed as such; but to say this is not to claim that psychoanalysis should be equated with or subordinated to consumerism.

For as I will hope to have demonstrated by now in the book’s various contexts, consumption is in no way simple or single, and part of the aim will have been to point out the tendency in relation to many kinds of argument either to dismiss it as beneath attention, or to overlook it as something which needs no analysis. This is as true of literature, criticism and feminist theory as it is of other fields: secret shoppers can be tracked down in the most unlikely discursive locations, just as other kinds of consumer may be visibly planted at strategic moments for the purposes of simplifying a discussion.

The elision of consumption as something not worth thinking about and not needing thinking about is indicative of a wish—one which itself requires explanation—to set consumerism off in a separate category, as a mere adjunct to psychology rather than as something which inflects its workings and possibilities at every turn. In the late twentieth century, consumption and psychology are as inseparable, and as all-pervasive in both a quotidian and a global sense, as they already appeared to be in the 1930s. But they are in no way as monolithic, either separately or together, as Huxley imagined them. This book is an attempt to look more closely at some of the odder elements omitted from the conveniently standardized label.

Chapter 2
Promoting Dorian Gray

A cigarette is the perfect type of the perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied.¹

These words, spoken by a character in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), grant to a much maligned weed a status possibly higher than any it has known before or since, and may well strike the late-twentieth-century reader as rather strong. In representing the cigarette not only as a pleasure, but as the very quintessence of pleasure, they make the kind of exorbitant claim associated not so much with the refinement of aestheticism as with the advertisement’s ‘unique selling point’. It might seem natural to draw a distinction between aestheticism and advertising, identifying the latter with all the vulgarity rejected by the defenders of ‘art for art’s sake’. In this chapter, I shall draw on Wilde’s Picture and draw on the cigarette to try to show the relative convergence of the two, both as practices and as philosophies. The aesthete, far from being different from the new consumer of the period, turns out to be none other than his or her ‘perfect type’.²

The cigarette is itself a case in point. One of the most ubiquitous and widely advertised commodities of the late nineteenth century, it none the less occupies a prominent and honourable position in the work of an avowed critic of vulgarity. Apart from Lord Henry’s epigrammatic eulogy, the utterances of the most tasteful characters in Wilde’s novel are punctuated throughout by reference to their sophisticated modes of lighting up.³

The punchline of Wilde’s aphorism could be taken as an analysis in miniature of the mechanism upon which advertising depends. The enjoyment of the ‘perfect pleasure’ results not in satisfaction but in a lack of it, leaving open the demand for more, the search for the next (or the same) short-lived and necessarily incomplete pleasure. In its structure, the aphorism itself reproduces the process it describes. Short and quick, like the cigarette, it operates by means of an apparent non sequitur: pleasure entails non-satisfaction. The paradoxical disruption of common sense constitutes both its appeal, what makes it distinctive, and its tantalizing refusal of the explanation which would also remove the source of that appeal.

Formally, then, the aphorism repeats the effects of pleasure and non-satisfaction attributed to its subject, securing a renewed quest for more satisfaction, be it of word or mouth. Lord Henry’s view of the cigarette points, in fact, towards concerns engaging advertisers and aesthetes alike. ‘Pleasure’ and the ‘exquisite’ of beauty are two; a third is the question of representation. Wilde was violently opposed to the ‘vulgar realism’ he caricatured in ‘the man who could call a spade a spade’ (215). Overturning what he thereby mocked as Arnoldian literalism, he defined the purposes of art as ‘to see the object as in itself it really is not’.⁴ His concern, like that of the advertiser, was with making the object appear beautiful, presenting it as anything but the hypothetical ‘object in itself’. The cigarette, as ‘the perfect pleasure’, could in a sense have been anything else; alternatively, the list of its virtues might have been multiplied or varied ad infinitum.

Calling a cigarette a cigarette would be as dull, in this regard, as calling a spade a spade, and Wilde’s novel demonstrates the untenability as well as the banality of any supposition of a fixed identity for things or people once they have been situated within any order of representation. The cigarette, again, is an apt illustration. It could connote the indolence of the beautiful life of the dandy but also, in another context, the sexually transgressive associations of the independent ‘new woman’ of the period. Rarely, if ever, is a cigarette only a cigarette: individuals, like objects, are open to any and every kind of verbal or visual portrayal without there being any original nature which the picture might be said to misrepresent. ‘It is simply expression which gives reality to things’ (121), declares Lord Henry; ‘Words! Mere words!… Was there anything so real as words?’ He refuses the mock title of Prince Paradox not on the grounds of inaccuracy but because ‘Names are everything’ and because ‘From a label there is no escape’ (215). The commercial-aesthetic etiquette of the label tickets human and other articles with tags that are quite arbitrary in their lack of relation to a prior essence.

The case of Sybil Vane, the actress with whom Dorian falls in love, shows the impossibility within the terms of the novel of anything like an ‘authentic’ personality. Initially, Sybil appeals by appearing as anyone but Sybil Vane:

Night after night I go to see her play. One evening she is Rosalind, and the next evening she is Imogen. I have seen her die in the gloom of an Italian tomb, sucking the poison from her lover’s lips. I have watched her wandering through the forest of Arden, disguised as a pretty boy in hose and doublet and dainty cap. She has been mad, and has come into the presence of a guilty king, and given him rue to wear, and bitter herbs to taste of. She has been innocent, and the black hands of jealousy have crushed her reed-like throat. I have seen her in every age and in every costume. Ordinary women never appeal to one’s imagination. They are limited to their century. No glamour ever transfigures them. One knows their minds as easily as one knows their bonnets. One can always find them. There is no mystery in any of them. They ride in the Park in the morning, and chatter at tea-parties in the afternoon. They have their stereotyped smile, and their fashionable manner. They are quite obvious. But an actress! How different an actress is!

(60)

Sybil’s multiple, ever-changing identities are themselves already fictional, Shakespeare’s female heroines figuring for Dorian in a spectacular history of ‘every age and every costume’. An artistic identity may itself be a cover for another, as when Sybil plays Rosalind playing a boy, and the sexual ambiguity confirms the ‘mystery’ attached to a someone known only as a discontinuous series of scripts and costumes, parts without a unifying whole. Against the lure of the mystery woman, or the woman as mystery, is set the ‘stereotyped’ banality and predictability of ‘ordinary women’, whose daytime transparency of repeated routines and identical clothes and manners bears no comparison to Sybil’s shifting obscurities ‘night after night’.

In Wilde’s short story ‘The Sphinx without a secret’, the narrator’s friend falls in love with a woman surrounded by an air of mystery, which he acknowledges to be a part of her attraction. The reason for this is never resolved. But at the end the question is no longer the nature of the secret, but whether there was one at all. The narrator concludes from his friend’s story:

Lady Alroy was simply a woman with a mania for mystery. She took these rooms for the pleasure of going there with her veil down, and imagining she was a heroine. She had a passion for secrecy, but she herself was merely a Sphinx without a secret.⁵

As long as the Sphinx can maintain her illusion of posing a question and withholding an answer, of being other than she seems, she has the lover in her power: ‘I wonder?’, he continues to ask at the end. The appeal is in the illusion of a concealed true identity, and nothing separates the illusion which is an illusion from the illusion which is only the illusion of an illusion.

Dorian’s love for Sybil dies when she ceases to be able to act. Fascinated initially by the thought of ‘the wonderful soul that is hidden away in that little ivory body’ (63), he is disillusioned by Sybil’s own proclaimed acquiescence in this representation of herself as masking an identity off the stage:

Before I knew you, acting was the one reality of my life. It was only in the theatre that I lived. I thought that it was all true. I was Rosalind one night, and Portia the other…. You came—oh, my beautiful love! and you freed my soul fr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Promoting Dorian Gray
• Chapter 3: ‘But she could have been reading Lady Chatterley’
• Chapter 4: Lolita and the poetry of advertising
• Chapter 5: A happy event
• Chapter 6: Frankenstein’s woman-to-be
• Chapter 7: Make up your mind
• Notes